Cyberspace Advertising vs. Other Media: Consumer vs. Mature Student Attitudes

ABSTRACT This paper reports on the findings of a survey about attitudes now, and predictions for the future, regarding web advertising versus other media, with college students as the target. College students9 present attitude toward web advertising is compared to the attitudes of people familiar with the web in Ducoffe9s 1996 study. Among the more notable results: while Ducoffe9s sample did not find web advertising to be irritating, annoying, or insulting to peoples9 intelligence, our student sample did. Additionally, students predict that web advertising will overtake television advertising as the most valuable source of information for the future. The paper also offers a new pragmatic model of Attitude toward Advertising that enhances the explanatory power of the Ducoffe (1996) model by adding to the antecedent variables.